Fifty years on, Alfred Kinsey is still controversial,
reports Phillip McCarthy in New York.

What would Professor Alfred Kinsey, the pioneering sex
researcher of the 1940s and 1950s, make of it all now? By
documenting just how much sex was really going on at the time - in
bedrooms, backseats and the occasional barnyard - he helped end the
tyranny of one-size-fits-all sex. That concept was summed up in a
phrase applied to the era's outward etiquette of dull but decent
sex: the missionary position.

But, 50 years later, the missionary position is making a
comeback, of sorts, on Kinsey's home turf, America. It's not sexual
positioning any more - it's too late to recall the Karma Sutra,
reproductive freedom, Viagra and six seasons of Sex and the
City - as much as political posturing.

In the current climate of assertive Christian fundamentalism -
where a highly politicised segment of the electorate accept
creationism and embrace Old Testament-style social prohibitions -
Kinsey probably has an approval rating lower than that other
heretic - scientist Charles Darwin. But, culturally speaking,
Kinsey is the undead - back to haunt the wowsers with his flaws,
his figures and his findings, and lots of them want to drive a
stake through his heart. Again.

"The reaction long before the film came out was scary,"
director-writer Bill Condon said. "It was like we had made not a
biography of a flawed, important man, but propaganda for adulterous
gay sex. And I hadn't even finished cutting the film."

Kinsey stars charismatic Oscar nominee Liam Neeson. It
probably didn't help that the film came out in the US a few days
after George W. Bush won a "morals vote" election and 11 states
banned gay marriage.

Almost 50 years after his death, the good professor has wound up
back in the trenches of the culture wars.

He was, after all, bisexual and a steady drumbeat of detractors
over the past 20 years have made all sorts of lurid allegations
about his research and his methods.

Still, there is no media aphrodisiac quite like controversy and
Kinsey, despite the rumpled suits and bad haircut, has been having
a mini renaissance.

There were two literary biographies in two years - a hostile
American one in 1997 and a sympathetic British one in 1998 - and a
novel, The Inner Circle, which treats the Kinsey clique in
the 1950s like a Jackie Collins potboiler.

Condon's film - which stars another Oscar nominee, Laura Linney,
as Kinsey's more free-spirited wife, Clara - is a bit more serious.
Condon, 49, was nominated for an Oscar in 2003 for his screenplay
for Chicago and won an Oscar four years ago for his script for
Gods and Monsters, a cleverly original biopic of a lesser
1950s-era personality, the Hollywood horror director James Whale.
Condon also directed the movie in which Ian McKellen played
Whale.

Neeson with on-screen wife Laura Linney.Photo:Supplied

Compared with Gods and Monsters, in which Condon
allowed himself flights of expressionist whimsy that played off
Whale's horror- movie aesthetic, it's Kinsey is formally structured
and conventionally toned. It was the nature of the material, he
says.

"I really prefer that more unconventional approach, where you
just take snapshots of a person," Condon said.

"But I couldn't figure out a way to do that with Kinsey and
include everything. It's a bit more disciplined."

Among the indictments of the film from zealots is a dismissal of
Condon himself as "a homosexual activist". Yet the film makes
Kinsey about as appealingly clumsy as a homosexual dabbler as it
does of him as a husband, father or a rounded human being.

"The funny thing is that the extent of my activism is that I'm
out as a gay man," Condon said. "I mean, I can't point to a thing
I've done to advance some gay agenda beyond living my life. What
did they want me to do? Ignore Kinsey's bisexuality because I'm
gay?"

The creepiest scene in Kinsey is one in which Neeson
and a Kinsey aide and intimate named Clyde Martin, played by Peter
Sarsgaard, interview a pedophile, who is identified in the
literature elsewhere as one Rex King. King is proud enough of his
exploits to have volunteered to share them for science.

Midway through the interview, Martin is so appalled at what he
is hearing that he bolts from the room. There is no editorialising
in the dialogue, but the scene's tone is emotional. Kinsey stays on
taking notes and, if he is suppressing revulsion, you would never
know it.

So far that sort of nuanced tone, plus the controversy, has
worked well for the film. It's on track to make its budget back.
And, with three Golden Globe nominations - best picture (drama) and
acting nods for Neeson and Linney - the film could have the
traction to pick up some Oscar nominations.

For Neeson, getting sucked into the Kinsey vortex - and it was
an encounter that was spread over several years, as the producers
struggled to get financing - was "strangely surreal". And it is not
like Neeson, 52, hasn't played real-life characters before. His
finest work has come in roles such as Oskar Schindler in Steven
Spielberg's Schlinder's List, and the conflicted Irish
insurgent Michael Collins in the film by Neil Jordan.

Curiously, even his stage evocation in New York of Oscar Wilde,
in David Hare's The Judas Kiss, was appreciated for its
dramatic merits rather than the scandalous fact that here was
another historic luminary with a wife who had sex with other
men.

"I tend to read a lot when I'm researching one of these
real-life characters," Neeson said. "And, I have to say, the
literature has never given me as much freedom to choose, as I did
with Kinsey. There was a headline I read somewhere - Kinsey:
Liberator or Pervert? - and, really, it summed up the spread of
opinion.

"But Kinsey once said that there were only three sexual
abnormalities - abstinence, celibacy and delayed marriage - so he
was asking for trouble."